High Tea

High Tea includes a selection of delicious sandwiches, scones and sweet treats.
Accompanied by your choice from our extensive selection of teas and coffees.
Served daily between 10am and 5pm - Bookings are essential. Ph: 06 855 8274

Taking tea at Oruawharo is the opportunity to participate in the gentry lifestyle of founders Sydney and Sophia Johnston and the busy social life that characterised the homestead in their day.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Oruawharo was the regular meeting place of some of New Zealand’s leading social and political dignitaries. The women dressed in the graceful sweeping gowns of the time, the men in elegant formal attire, would gather in the wood-panelled dining room, before the roaring drawing room fire, or in summer on the veranda and lawn, to participate in what was an almost ceremonial occasion.

Or If they were to call to tea today those elegant ladies and gentlemen would find little had changed. They’d discover tea parties being served as in the past, on the veranda, the lawn or in the wood-panelled dining room, the tables laid with fine china, crystal, silver, and crisp linen napery.

As on those refined early occasions, today’s guests are offered a selection of teas. In modern times these are blended especially for Oruawharo and available for purchase in attractive canisters decorated with exquisite Victorian and Edwardian artworks.

Hostess Dianne follows the pattern of her predecessors, preparing a selection of delicate sandwiches, scones and cakes to serve on pretty tiered stands, and guests are waited on, just as they would have been by the huge house staff who served Oruawharo’s first visitors.